Artist's impression of the planet OGLE-TR-L9b. Circling its host star in about 2.5 days, it lies at only three percent of the Earth-Sun distance from its star, making the planet very hot with a bloated roiling atmosphere.
Credit: ESO/H. Zodet

At the Heart of Orion

Near the center of this sharp cosmic portrait, at the heart of the Orion Nebula, are four hot, massive stars known as the Trapezium. Tightly gathered within a region about 1.5 light-years in radius, they dominate the core of the dense Orion Nebula Star Cluster. About three million years old, the Orion Nebula Cluster was even more compact in its younger years and a dynamical study indicates that runaway stellar collisions at an earlier age may have formed a black hole with more than 100 times the mass of the Sun.
Image Credit & Copyright: László Francsics

The star cluster Messier 47

This spectacular image of the star cluster Messier 47 was taken using the Wide Field Imager camera, installed on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. This young open cluster is dominated by a sprinkling of brilliant blue stars but also contains a few contrasting red giant stars.
Credit: ESO

Planetary System Around HD 69830

The HARPS measurement reveal the presence of three planets with masses between 10 and 18 Earth masses around HD 69830, a rather normal star slightly less massive than the Sun. From previous observations, it seems that there exists also an asteroid belt, whose location is unknown. It could either lie between the two outermost planets, or farther from its parent star than 0.8 the mean Earth-Sun distance.
Credit: ESO

VISTA stares deep into the cosmos

This view shows a section of the widest deep view of the sky ever taken using infrared light, with a total effective exposure time of 55 hours. It was created by combining more than 6000 individual images from the VISTA survey telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. This picture shows a region of the sky known as the COSMOS field in the constellation of Sextans. More than 200 000 galaxies have been identified in this picture.
Credit: ESO/UltraVISTA team

Artist’s impression of mysterious alignment of quasar rotation axes

This artist's impression shows schematically the mysterious alignments between the spin axes of quasars and the large-scale structures that they inhabit that observations with ESO’s Very Large Telescope have revealed. The large-scale structure is shown in blue and quasars are marked in white with the rotation axes of their black holes indicated with a line. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

A Star Cluster in the Wake of Carina

This colourful new image from the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile shows the star cluster NGC 3590. These stars shine brightly in front of a dramatic landscape of dark patches of dust and richly hued clouds of glowing gas. Credit: ESO

Composite view of the galaxy NGC 1433 from ALMA and Hubble

The dim blue background image, showing the central dust lanes of this galaxy, comes from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The coloured structures near the centre are from recent ALMA observations that have revealed a spiral shape, as well as an unexpected outflow, for the first time. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/NASA/ESA/F. Combes